With the rise of mobile technology, video has taken on a new priority as a method of driving traffic to your website, blog content, and landing pages. Videos are fun, popular, easy-to-view on mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, and they have the potential to become viral quickly. YouTube is an active search engine on its own. When combined with Google, the power behind the video phenomenon becomes exponential.
How to Add SEO to Videos
SEO can be added in several ways on YouTube in order to peak appearance at the top of the SERPs for both YouTube and Google. If your video is hosted on YouTube, it is already embedded with the rich metadata needed to make it stand out on Google. On other sites, you may have to add the rich snippets yourself. These rich snippets make it clear to search engines that you are posting a video. Google often places videos in one or more prominent locations in the SERPs, with a miniature image of the video and its rating. This type of result lets a searcher see immediately that one of their results is a video.
Keyword for YouTube
Additionally, you can add SEO in several ways on your YouTube account.
- Use keywords in the title, URL, and description of the video. Make the description as complete as possible. If you are not sure what keywords to use, look at the keywords on your competitor’s videos.
- Create keyword-rich playlists to group your related videos together on your channel. You can also add a keyword-rich description of your playlist.
- Add tags to your video that are direct and contain keywords. Tags help internal YouTube search categorize your video.
- Choose great thumbnails for your video image.
- Create a video sitemap to tell Google what is in your videos.
- Keep videos short and sweet, between 30 seconds and 5 minutes. Statistics show that after 30 seconds, viewership drops off.
- Create a channel name that reflects your brand and keywords.
- Add a full description to your channel to give it an SEO boost.
Each video you post can have links in the description and within the video itself to push traffic to your website. You can also place a call-to-action with a clickable link at the end of your video to refer people to your site.
Extra SEO Boost
One trick to get extra SEO points is to add the transcription of the video in the description. The transcription explains in text what the video is about, giving the search engines more information to match with search queries.
Paula A has a mind that is often taken off in flights of fantasy, imagining traveling in mystical worlds and meeting creatures of brilliant imagination.
